Israeli Troops Are Suspected in Shooting of a Teenager

The Israeli military said it would immediately investigate reports that soldiers killed a 13-year-old Palestinian on Thursday night during a confrontation in a village near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

The boy, Bahaa Sameer Mousa Bader, was shot once in the chest and died 20 minutes after arriving at the hospital, said Dr. Sameer Saliba of the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the soldiers had entered Beit Liqya, a village of 8,000 near the barrier that separates most of the West Bank from Israel, to stop people from hurling rocks at the barrier. The spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity under military protocol, said the troops had responded with live ammunition when residents threw firebombs at them as they were leaving the area.

Ehab Bessaiso, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, condemned the killing “with all means,” saying in an interview that “the accumulation of incidents like this is undermining all efforts towards achieving a political solution, and in fact is contributing to instability in the region.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization said Bahaa was the 53rd Palestinian killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem this year, including several teenagers whose deaths set off protests in the streets and outcries abroad.

Last month, Mohamed Sinokrot, 15, was killed by what a Palestinian doctor determined in an autopsy to have been a sponge-covered police bullet that hit his head during a clash in East Jerusalem. In May, Nadeem Siam Nawara, 17, and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Salameh, 16, were shot during a protest on Nakba Day, which commemorates the Palestinian expulsion from the land that became Israel in 1948.

The Israeli military has not released results of a promised investigation into the Nakba Day shootings. A Palestinian doctor said the youths had been killed by live ammunition, though soldiers supposedly did not fire any.